An article in Bloomberg highlights the plan to reduce hiring in SAP, As inidcated by Claus Heinrich an SAP board member in charge of personnel.: Excerpts:

The ratio of new software engineers to total new hires will drop in 2007 from more than 50 percent this year, said Claus Heinrich, in an interview. Expansion of the sales force will also decelerate as SAP relies more on the Internet to sell to smaller companies. "It's clear that we peaked in 2006,''

SAP plans to hire engineers at a lower pace next year and focus on improving employee productivity after expanding its workforce by about 20 percent in two years.

SAP added 2,600 employees in the first nine months of 2006, after an addition of almost 3,700 last year. The total workforce of 38,500 employees is about 40 percent smaller than that of Oracle Corp., which spent $20 billion in two years buying mostly software companies that run business-management tasks. Kagermann's target is to hire 3,500 workers in 2006.

``Our revenue and profit per employee will go up,'' Heinrich, 51, said. He declined to be specific. ``And that will continue.''Revenue per worker at SAP was about 10 percent higher than that of Redwood City, California-based Oracle in the last financial year in dollar terms, based on Bloomberg data.

Hiring at SAP next will continue to focus on Asia, where the company has about 3,000 developers, mostly in Bangalore in India, Heinrich said. SAP announced in March that it plans to triple its software engineers in China to 1,500 by 2008.

``The number of developers in Asia is still a long way from Europe,'' he said. ``We're very carefully looking at each location. We're still seeing higher salary increases in India, but because of the strong euro, this is still a very attractive location for us.''

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Prashanth Rai